Finding out about SOSUS

The film The Sonic Sea, a documentary on anthropogenic ocean noise that was produced in 2016, opens with a testimonial by marine biologist Kenneth C. Balcomb III. In it, he tells the story of a stranding of sixteen whales that took place in the Northern Bahamas on 15 March 2000. He states, ‘Something was causing all of these whales to want to abandon the deep water and get the hell out of there. It was kind of devastating. Animals that I had grown to know over a ten-year period were now dead. They were trying to get away. I was driven to find out why.’Footnote ⁵ The next day, he flew over the sea, close to where the stranding had taken place:

He then proceeded to send six whale heads from a total of sixteen beached whales to Harvard Medical School in order to collect evidence to see what had killed them. The CT scans revealed the whales had haemorrhaged around the brain and ears. While the Navy initially denied responsibility for the whale strandings, the fact that the evidence had been collected made it possible to carry out an investigation and, on 7 January 2002, ‘the U.S. Navy has concluded that it killed at least six whales in an accident involving common ship-based sonars’.Footnote ⁷ What they did not admit was that they were probably trying out a new lower frequency sonar system, the SURTASS LFA, which was then being tested by the Navy, and that they were awaiting a permit from the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) to deploy it.Footnote ⁸ Nevertheless, this admission became a ‘landmark’ case because ‘while marine mammal scientists had suspected that sonar pings produced by military ships may have played a role’ in mass strandings, this was, at that moment, the only one in which the evidence had been gathered to support a juridical investigation and thereby ‘reveal evidence of sound-energy injuries’.Footnote ⁹

Why do I open this essay with this event and its juridical significance? I have taught this film multiple times in classes on acoustic ecology, and since it centres on the lethal effects of ocean noise, this event stands simply as one more among the other cases the film documents. However, after repeated viewings of the film and research into the lawsuit that this stranding generated, it became evident that the film was made not only to educate the public about anthropogenic noise, but also as a specific type of stance in the juridical defence of regulating underwater ocean noise to protect marine life, a lawsuit for which Kenneth C. Balcomb’s ‘gathering of evidence’ was central. What this reveals is that more than one form of underwater listening lies at the crux of the significance of this single event and its harnessing for politico-juridical means: that of the U.S. Navy and that of the scientists involved in the lawsuit. Both stand on opposite sides of the forms of responsibility toward animal life yet are implicated in the use of underwater listening technologies, albeit for different ends.

The scientists denounce anthropogenic noise and its effects on whales, and the ways that humans are ‘acoustically bleaching’Footnote ¹⁰ the ocean, as stated by scientist Christopher W. Clark in the film. As the film progresses, we are introduced to the main causes of such acoustic bleaching: sonars used for marine surveillance by the U.S. Navy (and other navies worldwide), ship noise due to global marine traffic, and the use of industrial air guns for prospecting for oil, gas, and underwater minerals, all of which produce a deadly amount of oceanic anthropogenic noise, affecting the very viability of ocean life. Towards the end of the film, we hear from personnel of the U.S. Navy for whom national strategic security is more important than protecting the lives of oceanic beings. Conjoining these conflicting positions are shared sound technologies on which both depend: those that make it possible to listen to both enemy submarines and submarine life, such as SOSUS.

I first heard of SOSUS in this film, mentioned, in passing, as a historically highly secretive auditory tool. Following that lead, what emerged was a transatlantic oceanic acoustic history of subaquatic listening, in which the Caribbean emerged as a central location of scientific exploration and oceanography that deeply intertwined the history of the geophysics of the ocean floor, the study of the acoustic properties of sound transmission in the ocean, and underwater auditory surveillance during the Second World War and the Cold War. So this is not an article about listening to the killing of whales, but one about how the gathering of evidence for the killing of whales and the dissemination of that account as part of the narration of a juridical struggle between ocean scientists and the U.S. Navy leads to the surfacing of the history of underwater listening as a massive surveillance operation.Footnote ¹¹ My interest therefore lies less in doing a critical analysis of the way whale-produced sounds have been interpreted, producing ‘an ethical grammar of suffering and care’ as has been done recently in Gavin Steingo’s Interspecies Communication,Footnote ¹² and more in using this film as a way to trace the historiography of the rise of underwater ocean listening through one instrument: SOSUS.

SOSUS is a passive sonar – meaning it does not emit sounds in order to detect objects – that uses an array of underwater hydrophones connected to listening stations on land in order to listen to sounds in the ocean. The question of how to listen to the ocean became a key question for the United States in the early twentieth century, when the appearance of the German U-Boat propelled a need for submarine research in the service of anti-submarine warfare.Footnote ¹³ This meant that the development of ocean studies in the United States took particular forms. The understanding of sound transmission in the ocean and the use of sonic devices to understand the geophysics of the ocean floor, as well as the acoustics of how sound was transmitted through water, became key issues for the development of sound surveillance and sonic weaponry.Footnote ¹⁴ This led to the continuous engineering of a series of listening devices and the study of oceanic acoustics as a means of mapping the ocean floor and the nature of sound transmission in oceanic waters, much of it taking place in the waters of and surrounding the Caribbean.

In what follows, I explore some of the history of acoustic research that gave rise to SOSUS as an instrument of surveillance, as a key to understanding the rise of a white, male, imperial oceanic acoustics that rendered the materiality of the ocean waters and their floors into so-called physical ‘properties’ to be harnessed in the service of war and the rise of oceanic science; the same properties that are used today in struggles for the defence of the very life such devices were designed to perceive and destroy. I follow Kathryn Yussof’s critique of geophysics as a science that separates the living from the non-living in order to enable a history of the Anthropocene that separates the history of dispossession and forced migration of Black and Indigenous peoples, and of colonialism’s necropolitics of extraction more broadly, from the history of the rise of the study of the material and physical properties of the earth as non-living matter.Footnote ¹⁵

For Yussof, ‘The division of matter into nonlife and life pertains not only to matter but to the racial organization of life as foundational to New World geographies’.Footnote ¹⁶ Moreover, as she elaborates:

Likewise, as I explore here, the rise of a white, male imperial submarine acoustics is crucial to the emergence of new notions of the Caribbean and of transatlantic crossings that reset the history of the human and non-human in the area through underwater oceanic exploration, tied to the United States’ expansion into the region as a site of sonic extraction.

It is not by chance that this historical period of submarine oceanic exploration coincides with a period of dramatic expansion by the United States into the Caribbean and Central America, whose formal beginnings we could place in the 1898 interventions in Cuba and the takeover of Puerto Rico, the Philippines, and Guam during the Spanish American war. This continued intensively through the ‘vigorous hard power’ of military interventions,Footnote ¹⁸ the establishment of military bases, and financial extraction made possible by the rise of what James Martin calls a ‘corporate colonialism’, in which financial investment and the business interests of the United States in the region flourished through a heavily racialized industrialized extractivism of sugar, bananas, precious woods, and other commodities until the rise of the Cold War.Footnote ¹⁹ But it also coincides with what Elizabeth DeLoughrey calls ‘the most significant, and yet largely unremarked remapping of the globe’ produced by the 1945 Truman Proclamation ‘which extended U.S. territory to include a two hundred nautical mile Exclusive Economic Zone (EZZ) . . . which led to a U.N. Convention of the Law of the Sea that effectively remapped seventy percent of the planet’.Footnote ²⁰

Elizabeth DeLoughrey describes an ‘oceanic turn’ in critical studies, focused less on ‘mobility across transoceanic surfaces’ and more ‘on oceanic submersion’ – a turn she understands as marked by the geopolitical history of the oceans, the crisis provoked by the failed promises of post-independence states, and the rising waters of the ocean due to climate change.Footnote ²¹ However, while she poses this turn, she simultaneously notes how in Caribbean art and literature ‘the ocean has long been understood as a material entity’ and ‘has long been theorized in terms of the violent convergence of environment and history’, highlighting a Caribbean aesthetics framed by what she calls ‘sea ontologies’.Footnote ²² Listening to the underwater ocean via hydrophones was a particular type of transoceanic sonic encounter that was important to military auditory surveillance and, eventually, to the rise of an environmental notion of deeply interconnected oceanic animal lives, whose sonic and listening power traversed the Atlantic.

Through geophysical research that exploited the properties of sound transmission in the region, a sophisticated secret apparatus of underwater listening was developed in the early twentieth century, which has been crucial to the rise of submarine warfare, oceanic science, and, more recently, to ecological oceanic activism, extending the history of this submarine oceanic emergence that DeLoughrey talks about to the very expansion of the United States as imperial power. What does the encounter between machine biopower and the exploration of the geophysical properties of sound transmission in the waters of the Caribbean tell us about the historiography of the Anthropocene as a site of transatlantic acoustic crossings? By machine biopower, I mean the design of human-made machines that follows research into sensory capabilities of living beings, one example of which is the history of sonars and echolocation. How does this history of the rise of oceanography in the United States, at a moment historically considered one of acceleration of the Anthropocene,Footnote ²³ tell us about the rise of an acoustics of oceanic submersion that was concomitant and complicit with the types of extractivism and imperial histories that are constitutive of the relation between colonialism and the Anthropocene? Why was SOSUS deployed in the Caribbean and its neighbouring waters in order to listen across the ocean, and what sort of geopolitical acoustics emerge from this?

The word ‘encounter’ as a term for transatlantic crossings has been heavily criticized within decolonial historiography, which highlights the necropolitics enacted by acts of possession of Black and Indigenous lives, waters, and lands as property. Here, I return to the original etymology of the word encounter as a ‘meeting of adversaries, confrontation or fight, from the old French, encontre’,Footnote ²⁴ as a potential entry point for problematizing the ear of surveillance in the expansion of the U.S. empire during the early to mid-twentieth century in the Caribbean.

Gavin Steingo and Jim Sykes have critiqued the epistemic and ontological history of othering that has existed in colonial histories that position sound and the Global South as inherently linked. They propose instead ‘a new cartography of global modernity for sound studies’ that ‘entails conceptualizing the South as a kind of radical horizon of geopolitics while dislodging the North as the site of the original and true’.Footnote ²⁵ Likewise, Steven Feld advocates for ‘problematizing sound by asking what it means to know in, with, and through it differently. I want studies of sounding with, to, and about, that is, studies of sound as a critical mode of relating and relationality across species and materialities’,Footnote ²⁶ rather than as a discipline. As is well known, reflections on the aural in the constitution of the Caribbean have long centred on a heightened aurality that has historically characterized the region, locating the auditory at the interpretive nexus of its colonial history and its decolonial phenomenology and, more than that, as constitutive of the region’s materiality.Footnote ²⁷

My own work has explored how listening to vocalizations was constitutive of the inscription of acts of listening as an anthropotechnology that was used not only to determine what did or did not count as a proper voice in the production of a proper notion of music or language, but also, by that very token, how the designation of a people as having a valid form of vocalization was used to determine the acoustically discriminatory boundary line of the juridical value between the human and non-human.Footnote ²⁸ By juridical value I mean the ways peoples and other beings are legally recognized or not through the ways the legal apparatus officially sets up participation and/or exclusion. Here, I seek to build on this scholarship by exploring how the acoustics of transatlantic anthropogenic crossings entangle the histories of imperial crossings and ecological activism. I am interested in exploring the theoretical implications of listening to devices for surveillance as constitutive of a precarious auditory alliance that enacts a ‘transmutation’ of acoustic matter by appropriating its liveness through the extraction of its properties for surveillance purposes. I see this as part of the history of dispossession that the anthropotechnologies of acoustic inscription have played in the region. I concentrate my study on the development of one acoustic device used to listen across oceans as part of the colonial history of undersea surveillance in the region: SOSUS.

Underwater listening and the oceanic Caribbean

Why was Kenneth C. Balcomb III observing whales in the Bahamas? His obituaries led me to appreciate how beloved a figure he was as a scientist, mentor, and activist.Footnote ²⁹ Balcomb was formed first as a zoologist and later as an oceanographer, and dedicated his life to the study of whales. He first encountered the sound of whales as a lieutenant in the U.S. Navy: ‘From 1967 to 1972, Ken served as lieutenant in the U.S. Navy as aviator and anti-submarine warfare specialist. . . . While working on a then-classified passive sonar submarine detection system known as SOSUS (Sound Surveillance System), Ken discovered and became fascinated with the undersea world of sound, especially whale vocalizations’.Footnote ³⁰ He also spent a lifetime of research centred on photo-identification of whales ‘on both coasts of the North American continent’.Footnote ³¹ In 1976, he founded the Center for Whale Research, which ‘has been the leading organization monitoring and studying Southern Resident killer whales in their critical habitat: the Pacific Northwest’s Salish Sea’.Footnote ³²

In 1991, the Center conducted a pilot project, ‘The Bahamas Marine Mammal Survey’, a ‘US-centered’ research project that eventually led, in 2006, to the foundation of the Bahamas Marine Mammal Research Organization,Footnote ³³ which has focused on the then little-known beaked whales, ‘year-long residents’ of the Sea of Abaco, ‘which is comprised of the waters north of Great Abaco Island and protected by the smaller Abaco Cays’.Footnote ³⁴ It is here in the northern Bahamas that the whale stranding depicted at the beginning of The Sonic Sea takes place. Balcomb is also praised, again and again in his obituaries, for dedicating years of his life as an activist advocating for limiting the use of Navy sonars in the ocean and taking the Navy to court in the defence of whales through a critique of anthropogenic noise.

Balcomb was able to ‘put two and two together’, as quoted at the beginning of this paper, and proceeded to gather evidence of the whale stranding because of his experience with SOSUS as a lieutenant in the Navy and his scientific knowledge of whales, which enabled him to recognize what had happened once he saw the ships of the U.S. Navy the day after the stranding. Evidently, he also seemed to be well aware of the U.S. Navy’s policy of denial of responsibility for such strandings. This led him to immediately gather juridical evidence that allowed this case to move forward by producing a CT scan of the whales’ haemorrhaging brains and ears. Balcomb’s career then moves from being stationed in one of SOSUS listening stations as a naval officer, to an oceanographer studying whales, to an activist who juridically denounces the very Navy of which he was a part for their role in the acoustic harm of oceanic life, all of this mediated by his love for whales and his initial work as a listener on a SOSUS station as a lieutenant. We have thus a changing auditory oceanscape of ‘otographic surveillance’ that shows us how crucial listening to the ocean as both a naval and scientific endeavour was to ‘the genesis of overhearing, as well as the genesis of the ontological surplus that constitutes it’.Footnote ³⁵

This transformation mirrors the acoustic changes of the Anthropocene: from harnessing the sounds of the ocean for military endeavours during the Cold War (for Balcomb in the 1960s) to the rise of an ecological listening by the early 2000s. Three elements characterize this listening. First, the changing nature of the admitted uses of what is considered auditory equipment and evidence – from one in which auditory technology is ‘shrouded in secrecy’, as was also the case with nuclear testing in the Marshall Islands,Footnote ³⁶ to one that utilizes the auditory injury of whales to obtain evidence as juridical proof of the unauthorized testing of sonars in Caribbean waters.

Second, the simultaneous existence of what Jessica Schwartz has called a ‘hyper-vigilant ear’ and a secret underwater listening. Schwartz studies how, during the Cold War, the citizens of the United States were subjected to a pedagogy of alarms and radio announcements that were to alert citizens to the potential for a nuclear attack in the United States, thus requiring that they develop a constant ‘aural alertness’ in order to properly respond to this threat. Meanwhile, what was being done with nuclear testing itself was rendered classified knowledge and highly secretive.Footnote ³⁷ Here, the ‘hypervigilant ear’ of submarine listening to a potential enemy gives rise, by the early 2000s, to an ‘aural alertness’ that listens ecologically with the knowledge of underwater sonar sound production as a secret operation of underwater sonic surveillance. Thus, ecological listening arises as an output of the military hypervigilant ear.

Third, between the 1960s and the 2000s, the scientific status of underwater listening and the technologies that make it possible also change: from a highly secretive and classified military endeavour in which, nevertheless, one can also hear underwater marine life, to the rise of the disciplines of ecoacoustics and soundscape ecology, made possible by the declassification and consequent appropriation of such listening technologies.Footnote ³⁸ The history of the rise of the study of ‘the soundscape of the Anthropocene ocean’Footnote ³⁹ emerges then as an ontological surplus of the hypervigilant ear of war as the submarine ear of oceanic ecoacoustics. But the transformation of Balcomb is not an exception. It follows the history of listening in the rise of oceanography in the United States.

The relationship between the rise of oceanography, science, and military exploration has been studied in detail by Gary E. Weir: ‘[Towards the end of the nineteenth century] Scientific exploration often took its place next to politics, trade and the economy, in the effort to make far-flung lands profitable for the British Empire. It came as no surprise that emerging naval powers like Germany and The United States did the same in the new century’.Footnote ⁴⁰ Roy R. Manstan has also studied how central the rise of ‘listeners’ was to the invention of the submarine and the design of strategic defence during the First World War. Both authors agree that submarine listening was given particular impetus by the fears provoked by the German invention of the U-Boat at the beginning of the twentieth century.Footnote ⁴¹ Anthropologist Stefan Helmreich, in his book on how scientists approach the study of waves, examines ‘how contexts of discovery, motivation, and justification in wave research have shifted from military to ecological concerns . . . even as ecological questions are still contoured by the wake of military framings’.Footnote ⁴²

Gary Weir studies how one of the key aspects that had to be developed throughout the rise of ocean studies in the United States was what he calls ‘a culture of translation’ between naval officers and scientists studying the ocean.Footnote ⁴³ His book, An Ocean in Common: American Naval Officers, Scientists and the Ocean Environment (2001), tracks the changing cooperative relations between scientists, located in different research institutions, and naval officers, located in different offices of the Navy throughout the early twentieth century into the 1960s. The years leading to the invention of SOSUS are remembered as a highly felicitous moment in this regard, involving not only key individuals in such cooperative relations but also substantial federal financial support for the development of sonic surveillance. According to Weir, ‘in the minds of submarine veterans, the ferocity of the naval war beneath the surface between 1940 and 1945 forever bound together sonar development, improved echo ranging, precise target identification, effective weapons, and a better understanding of the ocean environment’.Footnote ⁴⁴

More specifically, in the case of SOSUS, research in passive sonar technology became important because it could enable detection of an enemy without emitting a sound (as is the case with an active sonar), that would then potentially reveal the position of a submarine or ship equipped with active sonar as a mechanism for listening. For the purposes of this study, I would like to focus on how crucial research carried out between the East Coast of the United States, the Caribbean islands, and the waters of the Atlantic during this period forever changed the understanding of the geophysics of the oceanic floor, the properties of sound transmission in oceanic water, and therefore the very way the Caribbean is understood.

The invention of SOSUS is historically related to a path-breaking discovery of a sound conducting channel called the SOFAR (Sound Fixing and Ranging) or deep sound channel. The scientific ‘discovery’ of the SOFAR channel is attributed to scientists Maurice Ewing and J. Worzel, who conducted an experiment with ocean acoustics in the spring of 1944.Footnote ⁴⁵ According to Weir, Ewing had extensive experience conducting research between the East Coast and the Mid-Atlantic Ridge since the mid-1930s.Footnote ⁴⁶ This led him to gather existing research on deep sound transmission, and on 12 July 1943, Ewing wrote, in a letter to the Bureau of Ships,

The Sargasso Sea is located in the North Atlantic Ocean, off the eastern coast of the United States, north of the Greater Antilles, and is ‘the only sea defined only by ocean currents’.Footnote ⁴⁸ The Mid-Atlantic Ridge is part of the Mid-Ocean Ridge, the most extensive chain of mountains on the planet, most of it underwater. It ‘runs down the center of the Atlantic Ocean’ and ‘it has a deep rift valley along its crest’ that is ‘1 to 3 kilometers deep, about the depth and width of the Grand Canyon’.Footnote ⁴⁹

The discovery of SOFAR, and Ewing’s early suspicion about sound transmission at great distances, built on previous oceanographic research expeditions. The personnel of three institutions were crucial: Scripps Institution of Oceanography in California at the University of California San Diego, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution on the East Coast, both research centres on ocean studies, and the Navy’s Hydrographic Office. The cooperation of key persons in these institutions greatly advanced the understanding of the geophysical and sound transmission properties of both the Caribbean and the Pacific islands. In this period, for the Hydrographic Office, ‘surveys in strategically important areas took priority and governed the extent of Hydro’s cooperation with civilian service’.Footnote ⁵⁰ These strategic zones included ‘the triangular region between the U.S. East Coast, the Caribbean Sea, and the Panama Canal, as well as a similar geometry in the Pacific between southern California, Hawaii and Alaska’.Footnote ⁵¹

Particularly important in terms of creating a new understanding of the underwater Caribbean were the Navy-Princeton Expedition of 1932, which aimed to explore unusual ‘magnetic and gravitational phenomena’ in the Gulf of Mexico, and the Navy-American Geophysical Union (AGU) Expedition of 1936.Footnote ⁵² In the first expedition, research was undertaken beneath the waters surrounding Cuba, Key West, Jamaica, the Turks and Caicos Islands, Cat Island and San Salvador Island in the Bahamas, and other Caribbean places.Footnote ⁵³ For the first of these,

The second expedition, built on the knowledge of the previous one, studied ‘the acceleration of gravity in fifty-one stations and nine harbors’ between November 1936 and January 1937.Footnote ⁵⁵ The details of this trip trace the route taken to map the geophysics of the bottom of the ocean during this expedition:

I have taken the space to list the many sites where these expeditions did undersea exploration just to begin to understand the crucial geopolitics of the Caribbean and the surrounding Atlantic Ocean in these underwater oceanic measurements. As stated by Weir, ‘In addition to a wide array of sounding and sampling data, the expedition determined the true extent of the strip of negative gravity anomalies discovered north of Haiti and Puerto Rico by the 1928 and 1932 expeditions’.Footnote ⁵⁷ In a preliminary report to the AGU, Ewing commented that the anomaly strip ‘extends around the convex side of the Lesser Antillean Arc, having a total length of more than 1200 miles’.Footnote ⁵⁸ This type of geophysical research continued into the late 1930s and early 1940s.

Historically, the creation of SOSUS is always presented as derived from an experiment conducted by Ewing and Worzel in the spring of 1944, which consisted of dropping a hydrophone from a U.S. vessel, the RIV Saluda, that had set off from the oceanographic research station in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, while ‘a second ship dropped 4 lb. explosive charges set to explode deep in the ocean at distances up to 900 miles from the R/V Saluda’s hydrophone’.Footnote ⁵⁹ The result is that they heard ‘pulses of sound that travelled the 900 miles from one ship to the other. . . . For the first time researchers heard what they termed SOFAR, or a Sound Fixing and Ranging Transmission’.Footnote ⁶⁰ This event is seen as foundational to the science of modern ocean acoustics.Footnote ⁶¹ The RIV Saluda was stationed ‘in the vicinity of Eleuthera in the Bahamas’, while the other ship was stationed off the coast of West Africa.Footnote ⁶² But what emerges when one reads the history of oceanography is that this is not simply an isolated discovery. This was possible because of intense research on the geophysical properties of the ocean that had taken place between the Caribbean and the East Coast of the United States since the 1920s, intensified by the needs of different wars from the late 1930s and continuing thereafter well into the 1960s.

Part of what was understood from the expeditions prior to what is considered the epochal discovery of SOFAR in 1944, was the geophysics of the underwater terrain of the Caribbean, the Gulf of Mexico, and northern South America and its relation to the way sound transmission takes place in it. Particularly significant was the specific nature of ‘gravity anomalies’ in this section of the ocean. What are gravity anomalies? Gravity anomalies ‘highlight variations in the strength of the gravitational force over the surface of the Earth . . . [and] are often due to unusual concentrations of mass in a region . . . the presence of ocean trenches or even the depression of the landmass that was caused by the presence of glaciers millennia ago can cause negative gravity anomalies’.Footnote ⁶³ The two places on Earth with the biggest negative gravity anomalies are the Puerto Rico Trench, located on the boundary between the Caribbean Sea and the Atlantic, and the Indian Ocean.Footnote ⁶⁴ On the other hand,

What emerges from these trips is a new understanding of the distinctive geophysics of the Caribbean and the transatlantic region. These scientific experiments gave rise to continuous research on the geological formation of the ocean floors and other geophysical characteristics of the region that, until today, are presented as having a unique structure. Also, this general region of the Atlantic and its boundary with the Caribbean Sea is the meeting ground for several tectonic plates. Here we see the rise of a submarine transimperial oceanic geophysics that is produced in the early decades of the twentieth century by underwater acoustic surveillance. This happens through a hypervigilant listening that takes shape in the historical moment of U.S. expansionism into the Caribbean and Central America as key territories in the defence of the United States. The list of places in which the underwater measurements are undertaken leaves no doubt about the submarine cartographic redesign that is taking place here. The underwater Caribbean became a key player in the global geopolitics of the twentieth century, particularly in the rise of the United States as an imperial power.

The key significance of the discovery of SOFAR channel is that it is particularly conducive to low-frequency sounds and therefore permits their transmission across vast distances, thus making it an ideal medium for auditory espionage. The best-written explanation for non-oceanographers that I have found about SOFAR is by Deborah K. Smith:

SOFAR, ‘is so named because it was discovered that there was a “channel” in the deep ocean within which the acoustic energy from a small explosive charge . . . could travel over long distances’.Footnote ⁶⁷ Moreover, ‘this “channeling” of sound occurs because of the properties of sound and the temperature and pressure differences at different depths in the ocean. . . . At low and middle latitudes, the SOFAR channel axis lies between 600–1200 m below the sea surface. It is deepest in the subtropics and comes to the surface in high latitudes, where the sound propagates in the surface layer’.Footnote ⁶⁸ In short, the geophysical characteristics of the Caribbean Sea and the Atlantic were crucial to the discovery of the SOFAR channel and the development of its sound transmission capacities for undersea surveillance.

Smith writes that after this discovery, ‘the navy immediately saw the value of the SOFAR channel, launching Jezebel, which later became SOSUS, including the development of multiple listening stations throughout the Eastern United States and the Caribbean’.Footnote ⁶⁹ Jezebel (later SOSUS) was the code name for a project that began amidst great secrecy during the Cold War: ‘Arrays of hydrophones were placed on the ocean bottom and connected by underwater cables to processing centers located on shore’Footnote ⁷⁰ in order for them to be used to spy for Soviet submarines by listening in on them as part of an anti-submarine warfare effort, with offshore units which contained listening stations called NAVFACS, for ‘Naval Facilities’. But prior to the launching of Jezebel, beginning in the late 1940s, several listening experiments, including a ‘deepwater geophone and a hydrophone’, were initially set up in 1949 off the coast of Bermuda.Footnote ⁷¹ The Bermuda station was technologically updated in 1951, through a cooperation between Columbia University, Bell Laboratories, and the U.S. Navy. This station was used ‘for the next twenty years’ to record everything from whale sounds to submarine movements.Footnote ⁷²

With the onset of the Cold War, the need for an underwater surveillance system that could track Soviet submarines across vast distances increased. In July 1951, ‘the first deep water array was also installed in Eleuthera [in the Bahamas]’. It was a ‘40-hydrophone linear array, 1000 feet long installed in 240 fathoms of water’.Footnote ⁷³ By the early 1950s, three entities had joined forces to research and develop the SOSUS system: Bell Laboratories, the Western Electric Company, and the U.S. Navy. Lieutenant (later Commander) Joseph P. Kelly led Project Jezebel, which had by then been renamed with the unclassified title Project CAESAR in order to present the NAVFAC stations as oceanographic research facilities to a broader public.Footnote ⁷⁴ According to Weir, ‘this arrangement provided for a thorough research program in underwater sound with an emphasis on the detection and classification of low-frequency sound radiated from submarines’.Footnote ⁷⁵ Thus, ‘the first Caesar station – Station Charlie – built in 1954 at Ramey Airforce Base ninety miles west of San Juan, Puerto Rico – began effective listening in February, 1955’.Footnote ⁷⁶ Says Weir,

In sum, between the late 1930s and the 1960s, a series of underwater experiments with oceanic sound transmission, the geophysics of the Atlantic Ocean floor, and the invention and installation of newly invented and updated sound listening devices, dramatically changed the audioscape of humans listening to the ocean, all mediated by the needs of underwater submarine warfare. By the 1960s, SOSUS listening stations and arrays of hydrophones over the ocean floor had extended into the Atlantic and Pacific in multiple places. In 1991, after the end of the Cold War, SOSUS was declassified and today we find a vast network of submarine oceanic hydrophones across the globe that, as stated earlier, are used mainly for the study of oceanic sounds of living beings or anthropogenic sounds, as well as for the monitoring and study of undersea seismic activity.Footnote ⁷⁸

So, Kenneth Balcomb was listening to whales in the Bahamas and suspected the existence of U.S. Navy warships experimenting with sonars in the area, because the Bahamas and the Caribbean basin, more generally, have been crucial for a highly secret history of auditory oceanic research at least since the 1920s. It is highly probable that Balcomb was stationed either there or somewhere in the Caribbean while he was a lieutenant assigned to a SOSUS station. Anthropologist Amelia Moore calls the seven hundred islands in the Bahamas, ‘the Anthropocene islands’.Footnote ⁷⁹ By this she means a unique combination of flora, fauna, tourism, and scientific research that reveals how these islands ‘contain evidence of the long-term effects of anthropogenesis on the Bahamas Islands and the world’.Footnote ⁸⁰

In her book, Moore does not refer to the research mentioned here, which, because of its historical secrecy, is known mostly, as far as I can gather, to oceanographers and historians of the ocean. As we see here, such a history goes back, at least, to the mid-1930s. Rafael Ocasio has also written that, after the United States’ takeover of Puerto Rico in 1898, the island became a site of scientific experimentation that was crucial not only for science itself but for retrieving data on the governmental handling of its population.Footnote ⁸¹ What emerges in this small overview gathered from secondary sources is that the underwater acoustic explorations of the Caribbean were important not only for the islands, but for strategic decision-making processes during the Second World War and the Cold War, for the development of naval warfare, and for the development of oceanography as a science, forever intertwining listening as an ‘aesthetics of espionage’,Footnote ⁸² research on the geophysics of the ocean and its waters, with ecological listening and with the anthropogenic history of the planet.

What emerges when taking into account this history is a notion of the Caribbean that includes the underwater geophysics of the ocean floor and the structure of sound-transmitting ocean channels as central to the historical development of the region, mediated by auditory surveillance. This happened by turning oceanic sound transmission into ‘properties and property’ to be harnessed for acoustic surveillance at the same time that on land, we see the expansion of the economic and military interventions in the region, turning the region into a transimperial zone.

The aesthetics of auditory espionage, the aural Caribbean, and underwater ecological listening

This history of highly secret undersea research recasts the auditory trace-making of the Caribbean, highlighting the great significance of the geophysics of the ocean’s terrain and the sound transmission properties of water as crucial to the region’s history and to the way we think about the Anthropocene. We see here an imperial process of knowledge-making that arose amidst great secrecy, generating a historically significant political lapse of inaudibility, yet one that transformed the very significance of the region. This research was important not only for global wars but also for planetary history itself, for the very understanding of the relation between land and oceans by linking the acoustics and geophysics of the subaquatic Caribbean to the transformation of the region through U.S. expansionism on land.

Peter Szendy writes in the preface to the English translation of his book Sur-écoute: Esthetique de l’Espionage Footnote ⁸³ that the ‘structure’ of auditory espionage ‘alludes to the figure of the spy simultaneously as a motif or theme in (cinematic, literary, and musical) works of art (in short, in “aesthetic” productions in the common usage of the word), but also as the condition of possibility of listening in general’.Footnote ⁸⁴ This is so, because ‘what is at stake is . . . the ear of the other that precedes mine’.Footnote ⁸⁵ In other words, surveillance listening always implies anticipating the ear of the other. And listening in the ocean, where it is difficult to see, is always about listening in order to make it possible to perceive the other in places where the potential of the other being more than one is exacerbated because everything is heard at the same time: from whales and seismic movements, to underwater explosions and ship noises, to friendly or enemy submarines. So how can one think of the acoustic anthropogenic trace of such sonic surveillance?

Audrey Amsellem has studied what she calls ‘the neoliberal ear’, a research project in which she analyses the ubiquity of recording technologies, that ‘are now permeating most aspects of everyday life’.Footnote ⁸⁶ She investigates ‘non-creative recording practices in neoliberal life’ in order to explore how the ‘neoliberal ear’ is a ‘twenty-first century mode of listening to the world embedded into surveillance capitalism’. About this ear she says, ‘The neoliberal tools of surveillance capitalism are aural, but they are not interactive. Our voices, both in their literal and metaphoric manifestations, are turned into echoes, reverberations which escape our control, locked into data centers, without possibilities for intervention or interaction.’Footnote ⁸⁷ The history of SOSUS shows how the very sounds of the ocean were turned into echoes and reverberations for the purposes of science and war, inaudible to the inhabitants of the Caribbean and the world at large.

Grégoire Chamayou has written about the direct link between surveillance as listening to submarines in the ocean through the SOSUS stations, and today’s practice of data mining in the search for criminals in ‘an ocean of information’, linking the neoliberal moment with the Cold War via ‘an oceanic analogy’.Footnote ⁸⁸ He shows how ‘a model that had combined a global listening system, the mass collection of signals, and remote sensing via signature recognition, a few decades later would provide the conceptual basis for an altogether different kind of surveillance apparatus’,Footnote ⁸⁹ making citizens the purveyors of just such transmissions via data mining. These are the ‘non-creative recording practices’ that Amsellem investigates. But the history of undersea surveillance of SOSUS is much more than an anticipatory history of the ubiquity of today’s auditory surveillance. The historiographical implications for thinking of the turn to submarine oceanic studies, not as a recent phenomenon but as one crucial to the very rise of oceanography in the United States mean that the disjointed temporalities between sciences, warfare, ecological listening, and the rise of an ambient humanities or scientific ecoacoustics are constitutive of the Anthropocene as a transimperial enterprise. Steve Striffler has advocated for a turn in decolonial studies in anthropology towards questions of imperialism including ‘a deeper analysis of the political economic structures that propel imperialism and colonialism’ and proposes an anthropology that ‘needs to spend more time studying imperial power’.Footnote ⁹⁰ What I have intended to do here is not necessarily to argue about when a submarine oceanic turn begins, although of course, the material presented here places it with the capitalistic period of acceleration of the Anthropocene as produced by the industrialized forms of labour, extractivism, and expropriation inaugurated by U.S. imperialism. I have intended to study underwater oceanic surveillance as part of the political economy and anthropogenic history of the expansion of the United States into the Caribbean as part of the rise of the Anthropocene as provoked by the production of an underwater oceanic acoustics.

The movement between military and ecological elements in these underwater crossings has been a vast historical experiment that places the auditory underwater contours of the region’s geophysical history as crucial to twentieth-century warfare and the auditory recasting of interspecies relations. When engaging in auditory spying in the ocean ‘the listeners’Footnote ⁹¹ always attend to multiple sounds, thereby multiplying the potential question of whose ear is the other’s ear in a site marked by acute interspecies listening. The complaint that ocean sounds interfered constantly with auditory spying was common during the Cold War. Thus, the political conundrum faced in the auditory movement between humans, whales, submarines from enemy camps, and hydrophones is that ‘when we try to hear everything, we do not hear anything’.Footnote ⁹² In this history the precarisation of life via auditory surveillance as warfare is tied to the so-called discovery of the geophysical principles of the Caribbean and surrounding Atlantic oceanic floors and of the sound-transmitting properties of oceanic waters, with the concomitant celebration of the living beings that can be heard through this same listening technology. This generates what Gabriel Giorgi calls a ‘precarious alliance’Footnote ⁹³ which speaks, among other things, of the simultaneity of the precarization of labour and the precarization of the environment, ‘there where what is at stake in the new intensity of extraction of natural resources, is the viability of human and non-human lives itself’.Footnote ⁹⁴

What the anthropogenic history of auditory surveillance shows us is that the transatlantic listening between humans, non-humans, listening devices, and sounding oceanic geophysics in the Caribbean during the Second World War and the Cold War was much more than simply listening to submarines and accidental whales who happened to capture the imagination of many. It has been a precarious auditory alliance that has tied together the predicaments of war, life, and death in ways that we in the humanities are only beginning to understand. It is often said that we do not understand the extent of anthropogenic noise in the ocean because as humans we cannot hear such noise unless we are artificially exposed to it. Yet I think that we do not understand the extent of anthropogenic noise in the ocean because keeping it secret has been vital to the expansion of undersea prospecting for oil, gas, and minerals, to the development of underwater sonars for war, and to the intense ship noise generated by global trade. An anthropogenic history of practices of listening and recording underwater sounds makes us aware how deeply auditory histories are embedded in our changing planet.